More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Moliere, the supreme masters of the dramatic art.  To venture upon any comparison with them is to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard.  In his technic alone can he withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before him; in mere craftsmanship he is beyond question the foremost of all the moderns.  It must be said also that in his intellectual honesty, in his respect for the immitigable laws of character, he rarely falls short.  He lacks the clear serenity of Sophocles, the depth and the breadth of the myriad-minded Shakspere, the humorous toleration of Moliere.  The great Greek, the great Englishman, and the great Frenchman, are, all of them, liberal and sane and wholesome, whatever their subject-matter may be; and here it is that the Scandinavian is felt to be inferior.  There are few of his social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this is the reason why the most of them fail to attain the dignity of true and lofty tragedy.

Perhaps it is with Wagner that Ibsen should be grouped, rather than with Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere.  They are the two master-spirits of the stage in the nineteenth century.  They are both of them consummate craftsmen, having assimilated every profitable device of their predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art.  And yet with all their witchery and all their power, we may doubt whether their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding perspective of time.

     (1905.)

THE ART OF THE STAGE-MANAGER

As civilization becomes more and more complex, we can find more frequent instances of “specialization of function,” as the scientists term it.  Only a few years ago, engineering succeeded in getting itself recognized as one of the professions; and it has already split up into half a dozen branches, at least, and there are now not only civil engineers and mechanical engineers and mining engineers, but also electrical engineers—­and even chemical engineers.  The invention of the steel-frame building has brought into existence a special class of artizans known as “housesmiths,” a word probably unintelligible to our British cousins.  Sir Leslie Stephen, in his delightful ‘Studies of a Biographer,’ has a scholarly yet playful paper on the ‘Evolution of the Editor’; and Mr. W.J.  Henderson, in his interesting book on the ’Orchestra and Orchestral Music,’ traces the development of the conductor—­the musician whose duties are as important as they are novel, and who is not now expected to be able himself to play upon any particular instrument.